What’s New in R: June 22, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring an argument for why Quarto pairs so well with LLMs, a Quarto extension that saves you from repeating headings across slides, and a package for wrangling nested lists into tibbles. Let's dive in!
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Quarto
John Paul Helveston makes the case that Quarto is the ideal format to reach for when you're working with an LLM. Rather than asking a tool like Claude to produce a Word doc or PDF directly, you can have it generate a .qmd file, which is plain text, version-controllable, easy to edit by hand, and renders to whatever format you need from a single source. He even shows that asking for Quarto output is far more token-efficient (in one example, requesting a Word document directly cost 7.2 times more than going through Quarto). If you've been on the fence about Quarto, the fact that it works so well alongside LLMs is a great reason to give it a serious look.
Reveal.js Cascade
Mickaël Canouil's {quarto-revealjs-cascade} extension solves a small but persistent annoyance with Quarto Reveal.js slides: having to retype the same heading every time you want it to carry across multiple slides. The extension automatically repeats the heading chain when you start a new slide with ---, following the DRY principle, with options to limit how many heading levels cascade or to opt specific headings out with a .no-cascade class. It might sound niche, but if you make a lot of slides you'll probably recognize plenty of places this would come in handy. Installation is a one-liner with quarto add, plus a single filter entry in your YAML.
tibblify
{tibblify}, created by Jon Harmon and Maximilian Girlich, gives you an easy way to turn a nested list into a tidy tibble. If you've ever wrestled with JSON output or API responses and found the resulting nested lists genuinely confusing to work with, this is for you. It can rectangle data automatically, or you can define a schema with guess_tspec() for more control over the conversion, and it's faster than other rectangling tools for complex structures. Working with lists is something a lot of us find tricky, and this looks like a really useful tool for making them manageable.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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